Category Archives: Politics

More Oldham Questions

22 Wednesday Feb 2023

Posted by in Local Government, Manchester Theatre, Oldham Coliseum, Theatre

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Shame, shame, and shame again on Arts Council England and Oldham Council for effectively giving the finger to Oldham Coliseum, their audiences, and all the professionals who have worked there over the years, by not having the balls to come and be accountable for their decisions at the public meeting held at the theatre last night (Tuesday 21st February).

A lively audience heard speeches from Maxine Peake (right), Equity President Lynda Rooke (left) and writer Ian Kershaw (Writers Guild). Meanwhile Arts Council England snubbed the event and were rightfully ’empty chaired’ (centre).

It was a very moving event attended by well over 400 people – not just actors and technicians and creatives, but community activists, and, most importantly, life-long audience members for whom Oldham Coliseum is a totemic part of their identity. But the decision makers, and purse string holders, snubbed the event – despite being promised a fair and respectful hearing – telling the organisers that they were only prepared to have ‘private’ meetings.

Earlier in the day, Oldham Council (presumably with ACE’s blessing) rushed out a press release heralding plans for a shiny new £24m theatre.

An artist’s impression of the proposed new Coliseum building, notably without a fly tower, and reported without on site rehearsal space. There will be fewer seats and a much smaller stage.

But we’ve been here before with plans announced and shelved. If they had a coherent case to make… why not come and make it? By not turning up both bodies looked weak and rude and defensive – and worst of all it added to the sense that the new plans were to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. There is very little trust that this is going to happen, and that lack of trust was amplified by the failure of ACE and the Council to come and argue their corner.

According to Chris Lawson, the Coliseum’s Artistic Director and CEO, the new plans don’t include a rehearsal space (contrary to what is said in the press release), nor a fly tower, and has fewer seats – thus making the business model even more challenging. It really does sound like a ‘performance space’ rather than an actual theatre. There are voices at the Council who have said they are keen for it to remain a producing house, but this isn’t fully endorsed by ACE and seems to fade in and out like an old fashioned radio signal depending which reports you read. I sense that no one in charge understands the difference between a ‘performance space’ and a ‘theatre’ which is so much more.

Questions remain unanswered as to the fate of the £1.8m denied to the theatre but entrusted to Oldham Council which is yet to indicate how the money will be spent, or if there will be a transparent process by which creatives can apply for project money in the absence of the theatre itself. Indeed is there anyone on the Council with the expertise to manage such a fund? As Chris Lawson said, the Arts Council appear to have rejected the Coliseum’s plans for being ‘too risky’ – but exchanged them for ‘no plan whatsoever’ – ! – which a reasonable person might consider to be even riskier.

It was a massive misjudgement by Arts Council England and Oldham Council not to show up. It demonstrated contempt for the communities they are there to serve. How ACE have the brass neck to make people bidding for funds jump through hoops in terms of ‘engagement’ when they are too arrogant to ‘engage’ with anyone who might disagree with them.

And as for Oldham Council. It’s sickening to see a Labour Council (adopts Kinnock voice: ‘a Labour council!’) treating its constituents with such disregard. If local democracy is to mean anything, then those councillors need to feel it in the ballot box.

If ACE and Oldham Council are serious about providing a new theatre then why on earth wouldn’t they be jumping over each other to come and enthuse about the future and more importantly consult with the ‘stakeholders’ (I hate that word!) about what that space needs to be. The stakeholders were all there last night, in one place, but treated as if their views were of no relevance.

The Stakeholders were all there.

But even without the key players, it was a good meeting and genuinely inspirational as people talked about the community involvement and the theatre’s practical role as a cultural hub with regard to new writing, the South Asian and Roma communities, and its role in promoting performance skills for young people in the most deprived borough in Greater Manchester. There was a lot more of a sense of how important the theatre is beyond its core task of putting on shows than I was expecting.

The evening rounded off with Equity Campaigns Officer, Gareth Forest, reassuring the assembly that all the questions raised would not only be put to the Arts Council, but that he would remind them that anyone posing such a question ought to be in the room to do it person. He ended by directing people to the campaign website where you can scroll down for a handy guide to who to write to in support of the theatre. Please please please do click on the link and let’s fill the inboxes of everyone involved so that they can’t pretend this tsunami of passion can possibly be ignored again.

If the Marmoset seems a little out of sorts, then you’d be right. It’s hard to express quite how low my opinion of ACE is right now so if you are involved with ACE then I’m looking at you too. Grow up, show some maturity, and tell your colleagues to grow up while you’re at it. You are paid for out of the public purse, you have a duty to be fully accountable – and to ‘engage’ with the people who pay your wages.

Addendum:
Following Tuesday’s no-show at the public meeting to which they were invited (and since the Marmoset put paw to paper to scribble the above blog) the Arts Council has issued a formal statement which you can read in full, here. Laura Dyer, Deputy Chief Executive of ACE was also interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme on Saturday 25th February, which you can listen to here. Aside from the tin-eared nature of the following statement…

Only someone with a completely London-centric perspective, ignorant of the geography, the appalling public transport or any inkling of how a community such as Oldham works or engages with the world could write such a sentence in this context as if it somehow made the decision more acceptable.

…neither utterance adds much to the debate. It’s still baffling that the management of the Coliseum is attacked, blaming their application as ‘too risky’ and yet it’s deemed preferable to give the £1.8m to a body that neither applied for it, nor, as yet, has coherent plans for it. But more alarmingly – very alarmingly – there is no commitment, either in the written statement nor in Ms Dyer’s interview, to maintaining a resident, permanent producing company.

A ‘performing space’ is a building, not a theatre company. No one would describe the Oldham Coliseum as ‘a performance space’ because it is so so so much more than that.

It is very very hard indeed not to infer that the reason that neither ACE nor Oldham Council want to engage directly with stakeholders in a public forum is that they are unable or unwilling to address the questions around these two issues that would doubtless come their way. By issuing statements, and refusing to engage publicly with stakeholders, they project a bunker mentality which only adds to the prevailing sense of distrust. They can fix this very easily. If their ideas for the future of the Coliseum are tenable and exciting, come and tell us how great they are. If they’re as good as they believe them to be, then they will stand up to public scrutiny, and we’ll all be very happy, and go home dancing.

(If you’re new to the Marmoset and interested in anything you read on the blog page please find out more by clicking here and having a little explore)

Holy Spider – Voyeurism or Bearing Witness?

25 Wednesday Jan 2023

Posted by in Criticism, Film, Film Criticism, Media, New Releases, Sexual Politics, Television Criticism, Television Drama, Writing

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NB. There’s no way of talking about this without spoilers, although the film largely based on a true story, so it’s up to you.


Holy Spider is a tough watch. It’s a fictionalised account of the serial killer Saeed Hanaei, who murdered 16 women in Iran, all or most of whom were sex workers, in 2000-2001. He was ultimately caught and executed, but along the way, Hanaei became a folk hero of the religious right because of his claim that his killing spree was a divinely inspired mission to cleanse the streets of ‘corrupt women’.

Zar Amir Ebrahimi as Arezoo Rahimi in pursuit of the Holy Spider serial killer

In light of today’s protests by women in Iran against the strictures of the ‘Morality Police’ the story feels important and prophetic, suggesting that Hanaei’s twisted mentality is now enshrined in a state sanctioned murderously misogynistic DNA.

I should start by saying that I think Holy Spider is a very good film in many ways. It’s brilliantly made, utterly gripping, with superb acting all round. The director, Ali Abbasi, is himself Iranian (although he lives in Denmark now) and some might remember him from the very bizarre Border which came out a few years ago about a Troll working as a customs officer.

If you haven’t seen Border, dig it out. It’s VERY weird, completely original and utterly compelling.

But… But…. 

On the one hand Holy Spider follows an incredibly determined brave woman journalist, Arezoo Rahimi, who finally entraps Hanaei by posing as a sex worker and pursuing justice on behalf of his victims, on the other it endeavours to explore Hanaei’s psyche (embittered war veteran, religious zealot etc), following him as he commits murder after murder, which he gets away with because, as with Peter Sutcliffe, there is little sympathy for his sex worker victims who are seen as largely responsible for their own fate.

Hanaei is brilliantly and believably portrayed by Mehdi Majestani but is that part of the problem?

Here lies the problem. To tell this part of the story, Abbasi decides we need to watch not one, not two, but three very brutal murders, dwelling in graphic detail on highly disturbing images of their strangulation. While there is some attempt, certainly with two of the victims, to give them a hinterland and depth beyond being simply cinematic murder-fodder, there is clearly justification for the accusation that Abbasi is being unnecessarily voyeuristic. Wendy Ide in The Observer was particularly scathing, suggesting that this aspect of the film perpetuated precisely what it was attempting to critique and it was therefore only worthy of two stars. She has a point.

But… But…

I found myself very conflicted. In recent years, especially in the writing community, the consensus has been that we should aim to give far less narrative air time to perpetrators, and where possible make our stories about those who suffer at their hands. In 2021, in The Investigation, a brilliant Danish dramatisation around the murder of journalist Kim Wall in a wealthy entrepreneur’s private submarine, the perpetrator was neither named or featured at all. It was an incredibly affecting and powerful drama. 

Danish drama The Investigation resolutely denied the perpetrator airtime

The thing is, while I was blown away by the power of that Danish series, I can’t in all honesty bring myself to believe that this is the only way of respectfully telling these stories, after all sometimes it is our duty as writers to dig down into why people transgress in the way they do. In the case of Iran, where Abbasi is making a broader political point about ingrained cultural, political and religious misogyny, not to explore who Hanaei believes himself to be would be to render the whole enterprise utterly pointless.

Indeed, although Hanaei was caught after a potential victim managed to escape, the journalist’s brave, empowering entrapment story, gripping though it is, appears to be little more than worthy wish fulfilment. The truth of the film – and truth is what we’re about as writers and directors – lies in the parts of the film about which well-meaning, politically astute critics are so righteously critical.

So, could the film have been made without forcing us to watch those murders? Would one or two murders have been enough? The answer to that is yes, but I seriously doubt it would have been anywhere as powerful a statement as it is. It could reasonably – if uncomfortably – be argued that to do so would be less respectful of those victims, not more so, because in narrative terms the crimes would be sanitised for the audience, and Abbasi is addressing an audience who, he believes, simply do not take the issue of violence against women seriously. If there are people – sometimes controlling entire nations – who see violence against women as an abstract justified by a higher force, as divine retribution, then showing it as cold, brute, murderous evil done, repeatedly, by men (not gods), is thematically and politically justified. After all, that is the truth of the world.

When we meet the parents of one of the murdered women, torn apart by grief and shame, it is a hair-raising moment, precisely because we have lived the young woman’s terrible death with her. When Hanaei’s son coolly, proudly re-enacts his father’s crimes with his toddler sister, as if playing a children’s game, we flinch precisely because we have borne witness to the full horror of the deed as it happened.

And in a brilliant and shocking final act, the execution of Hanaei is seen to be equally brutal, the audience forced to watch in grim detail just as they have the murders of his female victims. We could equally ask do we really need to see that in all its horror? The answer for me is yes, because it exposes the suffocating pointlessness of any culture driven by retribution, divine or human.

In its brilliant conclusion, Holy Spider dramatises Hanaei passing his misogynist beliefs down to his son.

It has become easy to eschew voyeurism, and often there is good reason to be wearily impatient with tropes where women feature primarily as corpses, but equally there are times when those stories need to be told, and when perhaps those images need to be seen. 

Whether the balance is right here, and whether a woman director would have made this differently, or as effectively, or better, I genuinely have no idea. All I can say is that Holy Spider is an extremely powerful and disturbing film which I shall be thinking about for days if not weeks if not years, where a more discreet cinematic style might have been a good deal more forgettable.

It made me rightfully angry at the crime, not at the film maker, and I’ve never been one for blaming the messenger.

(If you’re new to the Marmoset and interested in anything you read on the blog page please find out more by clicking here and having a little explore)

Adult Human Female (or Please Can We Have a Non Binary Debate About Trans)

16 Friday Dec 2022

Posted by in Film Criticism, Free Speech, Sexual Politics, Trans

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A couple of days ago, a screening at Edinburgh University of Adult Human Female, a documentary which poses the feminist argument against aspects of radical trans activism had to be abandoned – for reasons of public safety – after protestors blocked people from entering the screening rooms on the basis (as I understand it) that the protestors believed the premise of the film to be transphobic.

I looked for a picture of the protest to balance this image but that would have meant identifying individuals which I think would be inappropriate for a variety of reasons.

There was a good deal of angry traffic about it on Twitter of course, but I sought out a variety of sources to try to get a handle on what had actually happened. Here’s the take from the BBC. For another angle check out The National (a pro Scottish Independence daily). Here’s what The Times said if you can get past the paywall. I’m offering these links because, significantly, The Guardian, at the time of writing, doesn’t appear to have covered it at all, and more worryingly Edinburgh University’s own student paper (helpfully called The Student Paper) made an editorial decision not to cover the story for the bewildering reason that to do so would be to platform hate. To which I did find myself thinking, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the film itself, ‘good luck with your journalistic careers’.

Whether Adult Human Female is or it isn’t transphobic, a University – supposedly a place of learning and a place for the exploration of ideas – is absolutely the last place where a screening of pretty much anything should be banned, as long as the content in question isn’t a direct incitement to violence. The idea of whether something is an incitement to hatred is harder to define. I know this because my cousin, a highly respected QC, had the job of trying to prove in court that Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, was guilty of incitement to racial hatred. I mean, how hard can that be? Well my cousin (of whom I’m very proud) knows his legal onions and there were two attempts to get a conviction, both of which failed. So even if a group of students feel a film, presenting a set of ideas, could be seen as an incitement to hatred, that doesn’t mean it is – there is a good deal of subjectivity involved, not to mention the matter of the free will of the audience – and again, a university should be somewhere where all sorts of ideas that people find challenging can be explored, free from intimidation by those who disagree. As Mrs Merton used to say, always with a mischievous smile, ‘Let’s have a heated debate!’.

The late, great Caroline Aherne as chat show host Mrs Merton who always encouraged her audience to have a ‘heated debate’.

But, hey, I’m a writer, and addicted to ideas so I sat down to watch Adult Human Female for myself to see whether censoring others from seeing it was in any way valid.

Well… there are some issues with it. The most immediate one is that there is some lazy visual editorialising which is completely unnecessary and which undermines the thoughtfulness of the speakers’ contributions. 

There is also a tendency throughout to generalise about ‘The Trans Community’ as if it were a single homogeneous thing – an overuse of the word ‘they’ without the viewer being clear who ‘they’ refers to. I’ve known and worked with at least five people who openly identify as Trans in one form or other, and they’re all different, all individuals, just as the members of any community are. I balk at anyone lumping the Jewish community into one, and we all know the dangers of judging Muslim communities by the behaviour and beliefs of radical, fundamentalist Islamists.

I imagine that many of the speakers in the documentary would have prefaced their comments by clarifying that they are talking specifically about the more extreme end of radical trans activism – with whom there is the noisiest conflict – and indeed there are moments when this is stated explicitly, but it needs more of that. I suspect that some of that defining of terms was simply edited out, but of course I can’t be sure.

On this theme, there is a tendency to turn anecdote, or the account of something specific, into a generality. Of course there are always extreme examples of behaviour in any demographic, but one needs to be careful about citing a specific event – which may well be absolutely true – but then extrapolating that outwards, suggesting that it necessarily represents a generalised truth. There are also a few generalised statements and assumptions which desperately need a bit of statistical backup, and may have even the staunchest gender critic saying ‘hang on a minute!’ 

I’m not itemising examples here, as I think it’s best if people who are interested enough come to their own conclusions.

But having said all of that, on the fundamentals of the politics; of why self ID is problematic; the confusion between sex and gender; why the term ‘cis’ is problematic; why the mantra ‘trans women are women’ is problematic; the issues around gender therapy/medical interventions and young people; why the progressive left is in such a tangle over gender politics; the role of lobby groups; and a few other issues besides, I’m on board with 85% of what the speakers (predominantly from the feminist left) have to say.

So… it’s a flawed piece which suffers from a lack of editorial/journalistic rigour but there’s much in it of value, and much there which could and should be shared, communally, as a prompt for fair and open discussion – and while it’s over 90 minutes long I found it engrossing and, despite moments of superimposed editorial pettiness, the speakers are intelligent and thoughtful.

Is it an incitement to hatred? Well, there’s a good deal of annoyance, frustration and arguably a bit of anger, but that’s not the same as hate – unless you’re the sort of person who has never encountered actual hate nor looked it up in a dictionary, and you’re confusing it with disagreement. And it’s not in any way an incitement to anyone to do anything, aside from being an appeal to those holding one set of views to listen to some counter arguments.

It’s terrifically depressing that proponents of a cause that is supposed to be about breaking down binary preconceptions, by attempting to stifle the debate, create the ultimate binary dynamic.

Of course you can only have the non-binary, nuanced view of this film if you actually watch it.

So here’s the link.

(If you’re new to the Marmoset and interested in anything you read on the blog page please find out more by clicking here and having a little explore)

She Said (and we all need to listen… and look in the mirror)

05 Monday Dec 2022

Posted by in #MeToo, Film, Film Criticism, New Releases, Sexual Politics

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I wasn’t in a hurry to see She Said, as, on paper, it sounded heavy going. Two hours and ten minutes of earnest New York Times journalists trying to nail the Harvey Weinstein story? Don’t we already know what happened? Perhaps this is why it has struggled at the Box Office, although numerous news items about how the movie has bombed but is ‘terribly good really’ haven’t helped. But then a friend posted emotionally about going to see it and it spurred me on to make the effort.

Zoe Kazan, Carey Mulligan, Andre Braugher & Patricia Clarkson nailing Harvey Weinstein

Well… for a movie where we do indeed know what happened, and where 80% of the running time is people on their phones, or reporting off-screen action, this is not only edge-of-the-seat gripping stuff, but incredibly moving. I went with my wife and we were both moved to tears (Gail’s from Sheffield and she’s dead hard!).

The genius of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s script is that it’s the tangential detail that acts as the emotional sucker punch. A Skype call where a child reveals the extent to which sexual violence has been normalised is painfully upsetting. A woman about to go into theatre for a mastectomy making a crucial choice to cast off decades of fear and oppression – and more like this – dramatise how it isn’t simply the sorry tale of Harvey Weinstein being brought to book; it isn’t about bringing down one dysfunctional and evil individual. It’s about forcing a long overdue tectonic cultural shift.

On a personal level, while I never witnessed anything on this scale, having worked in theatre and broadcast media for forty years, I’ve encountered a good deal of sexist bullying and intrusive behaviour… and, I’m sorry to say, turned a blind eye to a good deal of it, especially when I was younger in the 1980s, telling myself (wrongly) that as long as I wasn’t a participant, my hands were clean. Of course, all I did, along with pretty much everyone else, male and female, is help to perpetuate a toxic, abusive culture. I mention this, because, if you get anything from seeing this film it shouldn’t be to consider the problems it identifies as ‘other’.

If All The President’s Men is about journalists exposing a conspiracy in the highest echelons of power, She Said is about ending a conspiracy where really rather a lot of quite ordinary people have been complicit as well.

Mulligan and Kazan are both terrific as journalists Twohey and Kantor, and who wouldn’t want Patricia Clarkson as your editor???? There’s a great cameo from Samantha Morton and an incredibly moving supporting performance from Jennifer Ehle. This is a film that could so easily have been ‘worthy’ in a bad way, but it manages to be angry and passionate, and while I haven’t checked the historical accuracy yet, it certainly feels truthful (which is something different). I guess it’s ‘worthy’ in the best way possible, as in leaving me feeling that I’m not worthy… just blown away.

(If you’re new to the Marmoset and interested in anything you read on the blog page please find out more by clicking here and having a little explore)

The Tory Eye Test

13 Wednesday Jul 2022

Posted by in Politics

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You know when you go to the optician, and they do that thing?

You know??

You peer through a contraption, that makes you look like The Terminator…

…at a circle of meaningless dots and they say: ‘This one?’ Then they swap the lenses and add: ‘Or this one?’

‘This one?’ With a sing song tone. ‘Or… THIS one?’

‘This one?’ Trying to vary the tune now. ‘Or this one?’ Sounding a bit like Jeremy Clarkson.

‘This one? … Or…. This one…?’

You’re sitting there, trying not to inhale the optician’s halitosis and thinking: ‘Bloody hell, mate, they look exactly the same, only blurry and meaningless in a slightly different way!’

‘This one? … Or…. This one…?’

By this point you’re wondering whether to choose one for the sake of it.

‘This one? … Or…. This one?’

Anything to make it stop.

‘This one? … Or…. This one…?’

….

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you…

…The Tory leadership contest.

Who Wants To Be A Billionaire?

19 Tuesday Nov 2019

Posted by in Economics, General Election 2019, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party, Politics, Taxation

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Billionaires. Is it inherently wrong to have that much money? Is it ‘obscene’ (as John McDonnell said today)? Should we get rid of billionaires as some pro-Corbyn commentators (notably Labour’s Lloyd Russell-Moyle on the Emma Barnett show) have observed in recent weeks? Or simply make it impossible to have more than a billion pounds in the uk?

Screenshot 2019-11-19 at 16.00.38

No one contributed more to the popular perception of wealth than German cartoonist George Grosz

Ok, so I doubt anyone reading this would disagree that the increase in economic inequality not just in the UK, but globally, is a massive problem. But is the answer to it (is the answer to anything?) to start a populist vendetta against a hundred and fifty people whose wealth exceeds what is essentially a random number, picked out of the air because it’s eye catching and easy to remember? I’m not pleading their corner – I’m simply asking the question.

Why do we have billionaires? Russell-Moyle believes that the mere existence of billionaires creates poverty. I watched Laura Parker from Momentum expounding on BBC2’s Politics Live the other day that the only possible way a person could accrue a billion pounds is by aggressive tax avoidance, exploitation and shabby employment practices.

Screenshot 2019-11-19 at 15.51.23

Momentum’s Laura Parker believes all billionaires to be inherently dodgy

I have no idea if all one hundred and fifty UK billionaires are guilty of this, although depending on where you research this JK Rowling’s earnings have topped a billion dollars and I would be surprised to learn that she was into any of those (although to be fair I don’t know that she isn’t, she could be up to all sorts of heathen and fiendish evil for all I know).

Screenshot 2019-11-19 at 16.10.23

J K Rowling evil and heathen – depending on her net worth

I tentatively suggest that other factors are at play here, notably maths and technology. Quite simply there are more and more people on the planet, who want more and more stuff and modern technology means that it is easier and easier to sell that stuff… to all of them. Meanwhile inflation has meant that value per unit of currency has fallen over the decades.

Obscene? Or just a thing which is the inevitable result of population growth, and global consumerism and the reality that supply isn’t – nor will it ever be – globally collectivised.

Not right. Not wrong. Just maths and technology. And, for sure, probably a bit of tax avoidance and general skulduggery along the way in some instances.

So. If we did agree that having a billion pounds or more was obscene and that ultimately anyone who fell into that bracket simply wasn’t acceptable as a citizen in the UK how would we set about dealing with that?

For a start is a billion the right number? Are we talking about a billion pounds, a billion dollars, or a billion euros? Or is it just the idea of unimaginable wealth that we don’t like? If we are going to use words like ‘obscene’ where does obscenity start and acceptability finish? I mean why not £640million or £569,482.83p? Is £379m just mildly distasteful?

For it to make any kind of rational sense, you have to set a figure – just as we set a figure for top tax rates. Without a figure it’s meaningless and that figure has to be based on some kind of rationale other than blind resentment.

Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell has made a step towards this. He has made it clear that under a Labour administration no Chief exec in the public sector would be able to earn more than twenty times the National Living Wage. That’s somewhere around £350,000.

That’s a lot of cash to most of us, but small potatoes in CEO land.  And nowhere near a million, let alone a billion. Will it re-set the dial in terms of expectations? Possibly, but I doubt it. Will it stop the best people taking those jobs? I have literally no idea. My gut says that it would change the character of the type of person who applies for this kind of job, which could be a good thing… or not. I simply don’t know.

But there is an underlying message there from Mr McDonnell. We obviously want the best people to run the public sector but the acceptable remuneration for that is £350,000 per annum and no more. Implicit in this is that when you pursue more outside of the public sector you are effectively drinking and driving, you are using your mobile phone while doing 105 down the Motorway of life. Sort of like a premiership footballer, who earn, well, an obscene amount…!

Jeremy Corbyn Tweeted today: ‘Do you know what the establishment and the wealthy few are really afraid of? You.’

Screenshot 2019-11-19 at 16.16.17

According to Wikipedia, depending on what sort of year I have, my annual earnings usually fall between the top one and two per cent on the UK earnings scale.  In a good year, there are less than half a million individuals who earn as much as I do. Although technically speaking, I am on a zero hours contract… of sorts.

I really need to know who ‘the wealthy few’ are? I mean, if I’m one of them and I’m reading Jeremy’s Tweet… then according to him I’m AFRAID OF MYSELF!!!

If I feed my profile into the computers at Labour HQ I fear they will short circuit like the Nomad robot in Star Trek!

Screenshot 2019-11-19 at 16.18.24

James T Kirk was always confounding AIs with unresolvable paradoxes

Let’s assume that all of this comes to pass, and having money – or even aspiring to great wealth and prosperity becomes a social no-no – and exceeding a billion squids (or whatever random number) is outlawed, what do we expect those people to do?  There are many devout Corbynistas who say they don’t care and good riddance if the billionaires decide to bugger off. But is that really what we want? Whilst outlawing wealth reduces inequality on paper, it only does so by cooking the books and slicing off the top of the differential graph.

We have to remember what our objectives are. If they are simply ideological – ie billionaires can fuck off – then, for sure, we can achieve that, but there’s no guarantee that in doing that we alleviate poverty at the bottom of the income scale. If our objective is to alleviate poverty and redistribute wealth, then we have to keep the wealth in the country precisely so that it can be redistributed.

You can’t redistribute nothing.

Doing that isn’t easy, and there are a multitude of economic and political approaches to achieving effective redistribution. We could argue the toss about that for months, but I do know for sure that ‘banning billionaires’ or any associated Us-and-Themery won’t get us a millimetre closer to achieving that goal. It’s just populism. Divisive. Pointless. No different at its heart that the mentality of Donald Trump whipping up the crowd at one of his rallies, with the sole objective of fermenting yet moire hate. Are those the values of the Labour Party now? I do hope not.

Please can we be smart about this and think about what we want to achieve and not who we resent, or who we can blame simply for existing. We know exactly where that kind of thinking leads.

In the meantime, I’m going to ensure that my earnings stay at £999,999.99p and not a penny more. That way all my Corbynista friends will go on loving me.

First World Problems And My Pen Of Doom!

31 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by in Boris Johnson, Brexit, Civil War, Politics, Proroguing Parliament, Radio Drama, Satire, Writing

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As visitors to this page will know, back in the heady, carefree days of 2017 I was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to write a five-part drama imagining the UK plunging into a bloody civil war some time sort of now-ish.

FWP WIDE LARGE FONT

This was to be no sci-fi melodrama but a tale of a Radio 4-style (i.e. middle-class) family’s battle for survival in the face of social and infrastructure collapse, set against a thoroughly researched and war-gamed political backstory.

I called it First World Problems. See what I did there?

To that end, I assembled an array of in-house BBC expertise, academics and parliamentary advisers and researchers – top people who mostly approached the task as a sort of dystopian parlour game, albeit often with a fair degree of wry amusement.

I sat down with one senior political analyst in the airy canteen at BBC Millbank. Well, for starters, we decided it would help if there was someone in the background of my scenario with the civil service in their sights. This was for the BBC so my hypothetical crisis had to work with governments of every hue. On the left that might be a fictional fixer in the image of, say, a Seamus Milne, and on the right it could be someone like, oh, I don’t know… Dominic Cummings?

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We dared to imagine this man pulling the strings at Number Ten. Absurd!

How we laughed.

That was two years ago, and it seemed little more than a flight of darkly satirical fancy. When Cummings’s tenure was announced in July, my stomach turned.

Back in the canteen, my oracle postulated that with the civil service under attack, I’d now need an irreconcilable rift in the ruling superstructure to make my story credible. What if, following a chaotic Brexit, the infrastructure is cracking under the strain: Northern Ireland is subsumed into the Republic, Scotland bolts for the exit with an illegal IndyRef 2.0 resulting in a unilateral declaration of independence? There’s a scramble for control of the nukes at Faslane resulting in an armed and deadly conflagration. The border is closed, and Westminster goes nuts. MPs from all parties try to rein in the Executive, who in turn declares a state of emergency and prorogues Parliament, literally locking the MPs out of the building.

“I mean, I can’t really see it happening”, mused my adviser. Well, as Eric Morecambe might have said, “All the right notes, even if not necessarily in the right order”.

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Eric Morecambe takes a look at my projections back in 2017

There have been rumbles about prorogation all summer, but commentator after commentator insisted it would never happen. It was staying safely fictional, until Wednesday morning.

Please God any resemblance to real events stops right here!

However, within minutes there was speculation that it would turbo charge Nicola Sturgeon’s drive for a second referendum. As to whether that would ever be granted, who knows? If Westminster tried to block it, it doesn’t feel out of the ball park to imagine an enraged Scotland doing it anyway. And if they did? There’s a creeping sense with the departure of Ruth Davidson that perhaps Mr Johnson (or Mr Cummings??) doesn’t really care if Scotland cuts loose. It would make it easier for the Tories to hold a majority at Westminster if they did, but a whiplash fracturing of the Union would, as in my drama, be dangerously destabilising.

My excluded fictional MPs form a Democratic Alliance, which sits in an alternative chamber across the city (today suggested by more than one political player in the real world).

The country splits across the middle, with the big metropolitan authorities – the northern cities – siding with the rogue DA, while the south sticks with the Government. The Royal Family is forced to take sides. We all expect Elizabeth to stay neutral but who knows what Charles or William would do faced with future decisions, especially if the democratic mandate is unclear. This, in turn, begs the question of the military and the police. To whom are they now accountable? To whom are they loyal? What happens if they are split?

Other advisers warned of food and medicine shortages (now being prepared for), not to mention the fragility of the National Grid with multi-generator cascade failures (tick) as the fine balance of our energy infrastructure is disrupted.

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When the power went, people ‘self evacuated’ and walked along the tracks.

Never mind lightning strikes, imagine if Scotland stopped exporting its power across the border to England. In my dystopian Tomorrow, they who control the National Grid Control Centre at Wokingham don’t just control our ability to keep the lights on, they control the internet, the mobile phone network, our ability to get petrol out of the pumps at filling stations, and the BACS system so integral to our cashless world. They control the country.

Far fetched? Ridiculous? Hysterical?

That’s what I thought in 2017, and just look at how much of that has either come true or is creeping nearer to the front of the queue ready to be ticked off the list. Even worse, look at how much we have normalised these things, how quickly we ‘get used’ to them. That, for me, is the most dangerous part of this. Only yesterday I was conversing with one of my former advisers who seemed content that apathy and inertia would stop any major civil unrest happening as if he hadn’t noticed that we are already careering down the slide with no idea what’s at the bottom. Like the old joke about how an optimist  is a person who falls out of a twenty storey window only to shout to an office worker on the tenth floor, ‘All right so far!’.

Just before I penned my radio epic I had delivered a first draft of a police procedural about a series of murders of gay men initially mistaken for terrorism but which ultimately turn out to be the work of a closeted muslim guy unable to resolve deep personal inner turmoil. I delivered it to my producer the day before the Orlando Club shootings about which there has been much similar (but as yet unproven) speculation. The BBC’s Editorial Policy team decreed I would have to rewrite the whole thing even though my script pre-dated reality. Last year I wrote another procedural about the murder of a man, thrown from the window of a Manchester Hotel. Pretty much exactly that happened almost exactly two months after I delivered the script. Although my hotel was absolutely fictional, the imaginative starting point had been the same building.

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The police forensic tent outside Manchester’s Britannia Hotel in September 2018

Of course, these are simply unsettling coincidences.

Or are they?

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The chicken or the egg?

When First World Problems finally aired in 2018 I was accused by organised Twitter trolls of trying to ferment unrest, but whilst the causal accusation is ridiculous, as with all dystopian fiction, if you can construct a possible narrative from your imagination, no matter how seemingly implausible, then that narrative can become reality. A few years back Prof Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw wrote a book about quantum physics called, ‘Everything That Can Happen Will Happen’, but in the realm of human behaviour I’m increasingly inclined to think this is true, quantum or no quantum. If a person, or a group of people, can behave in a certain way, no matter how idiotic, then sooner or later someone will. Just ask anyone who has ever had to design a safety system.

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When I first saw this I thought it was a spoof…  It wasn’t. Although I have to admit a certain pride at being considered worthy of the BBC Death Cult Team.

A month after 9/11, two dozen Hollywood screenwriters were reputedly called in to the Pentagon hypothesise about ingenious and dastardly ways hostile agents could cause death and destruction across the US. I’m having difficulty verifying this, but if they weren’t, then perhaps they should have been. The dystopian and nihilistic imagination isn’t just the preserve of storytellers.

If we can imagine something bad coming, it’s worth taking our imaginations seriously – that’s what imagination is for after all – and then, hopefully, we can head our nightmares off at the pass before they become reality.

Having said that, my wife wants me to use my Pen Of Doom to write a drama about how the Amazon Rainforest is saved, or even better, some dialogue featuring a few winning lottery numbers.

And what about my fictional middle class Radio 4 family? Well you can still hear what happens to them here…

Suffice it to say when they flee the city to hide out in the now intensely nationalist North Wales, it doesn’t end well. They’re English after all.

Ethnic cleansing, anyone?

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Syrian migrants crossing Hungary in 2015.

This image was the spark for First World Problems. Although not ethnic cleansing per se, I wanted to examine how my comfortable, white, English, Radio 4 loving family could end up in exactly this situation in our own green and pleasant land.

I’m still praying that my dystopian hypothetical stays precisely that.

When Is A Penis Not A Penis?

06 Tuesday Aug 2019

Posted by in Film, Film Criticism, Media, Pornography, Satire, Sexual Politics

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I blame the vaccinations.

I’m 59 and a few weeks shy of a trip to Madagascar to see the lemurs (before the whole island is logged to destruction) the practice nurse advised me not only to renew my typhoid immunity but to have an MMR booster.

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The Marmoset is looking forward to meeting one of his cute Lemur cousins in Madagascar

Cue eighteen hours of slightly trippy wooziness not to mention two extremely sore upper arms. So that was any creative work out of the window. Unable to sleep – because every time I rolled over the pain woke me up – I rolled, instead, down to the tram and headed into Central Manchester to wooze in front of a movie at the city’s premier arthouse cinema, Home.

What to see in the dog days of August? I’m not sure if it’s me, or the exodus of creative talent from traditional movie making to long form TV drama, but I often struggle to find films that really attract me these days. Summer is particularly barren… there aren’t even any blockbusters I want to see. Squinting at the programme on offer I opt for Danish indie movie, Holiday – written and directed by Isabella Eklöf whose screenplay for the dark-as-dark-can-be realist Troll drama, Border, so haunted me last year. I’ve vaguely skim read a couple of reviews of Holiday (i.e. looked at the star ratings) and seem to remember that critics have quite liked it. So in I go.

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Great poster for ‘Holiday’ starring Victoria Carmen Sonne

Ok. I need to be up front about this. I didn’t make it to the end so I am not offering any kind of considered critique of the movie itself. No one can do that without watching the whole of something. To do so would be dishonest and wrong.

I blame the vaccinations. Or The Penis. Or perhaps a heady (!) combination of both.

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Spoilers ahoy – stop here and come back after you’ve seen the movie if you’re intending to take the plunge!

What follows below is a bit spoilery but not too much as it’s hardly a movie that depends on plot surprises. I sensed that most of the other people in the cinema knew what was coming (so to speak). Basically it’s the story of Sascha (Victoria Carmen Sonne), who (in film terms) is a sort of gangster’s moll (yes, the movie – and I – would eschew such dated and sexist terminology, but in critical terms that’s the genre/movie iconography we’re dealing with here). She’s on ‘holiday’ in Bodrum, Turkey, with her drug gangster boyfriend, Michael who is a violent, jealous misogynist.

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Lai Yde as Michael giving his best violent misogynist on a white sofa performance

For the 70 minutes or so I watched, Sascha is navigating his controlling, simmering violent possessiveness. He owns her. He owns everyone. But especially her – and she is his to use and abuse (graphically) as he chooses. The question those first seventy minutes poses is how much is she prepared tolerate? Is his assumed ownership of her somehow to her advantage? Is she helpless or is she complicit? Will she exploit it at some point?  Will she fight back?

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We get the point about Michael pretty quickly

As the holiday progresses she meets a friendly Dutch guy, Thomas, in an ice cream parlour and strikes up a more tender, if flirtatious (on both sides) relationship with him. Michael spots the connection between them and you know it’s not going to end well (although who knows, perhaps they all make up in the final reel and start a socialist commune in Aarhus. Like I say, I didn’t make it to the end.).

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Thijs Römer as friendly Thomas the nice Dutch chap

The whole thing is photographed at an unsettling and icy distance. The Turkish sunlight is bright and glaring – but never warm. We are never allowed to engage with Sascha – but we are invited to look at her, almost askance, to scrutinise her behaviour, and to judge her.

Then there’s… The Scene.

I should have read the reviews more closely.

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Kicking a lackey downstairs turns most movie drug lords a bit rapey

About fifty minutes in Michael has just beaten up one of his lackeys for messing up some drug deal or other, and he’s tense and angry, and so naturally he can only let off steam by vaginally, and orally raping Sascha and then ejaculating in her face.

Lawks a-mercy!

It’s played out in real time, in a continuous wide shot, in all its full frontal priapic and jizz-spurting glory.

Eugh. I’m literally hiding behind my iPad, thanking my lucky stars this isn’t a 4DX screening where they shake you around in your seat and spray your face with droplets!

I’ve seen some explicit movies in my time but this is just HORRIBLE.

Which I guess is the point. Although then I’m thinking… WHAT point exactly? My mind is racing.

I already know that rape is a terrible, terrifying, violent act. Do I need to see it? Does this actress really have to simulate abuse in this way to evoke this disgust in me? Hang on…. Is she simulating it? That purple greasy bell-end – moistened by Michael’s spit – looks pretty real to me – as does the glob of cum hitting her directly in the eye. (NB I am using this explicit language deliberately in order to express the graphic quality of the movie itself). So… what? Is the actress this guy’s partner in real life? What was the audition like? Even if she has consented to this, isn’t it still, effectively, abuse?

For sure, when the BBFC certificate came up at the beginning it did say ‘scenes of graphic sexual violence’ but I didn’t expect it to be this graphic. I look around and suddenly notice that the rest of the cinema is almost exclusively male. Men on their own. There are just two women in the screening. Did these guys know something I didn’t? Are they getting off on it? This is a foreign language ‘art’ movie, but what we’re seeing is the commonplace of a lot of pornography. A woman being horribly raped and the man firing off semen in her face. It is often said that the distinction between pornography and art is context, but any sense of context has completely gone now. Maybe I’m over thinking it – but my brain is now unable to watch or absorb the film as I try to decode what I’ve seen. But hey – ! – if I didn’t stop to think about it – if I didn’t worry about not just the story but the execution of the act for our entertainment – surely that would make me some kind of psychopath.

Well…

I hang on for another fifteen or twenty minutes… until the sexual violence starts up again and then I’ve had enough.

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This scene may well have ended with an innocent game of Twister but I’m afraid I didn’t stay to find out.

I’m hopeful that this film, written and directed by a woman, has some intelligent point to make, and all will make sense eventually, but in my newly vaccinated state I can’t help but think that there is no point to be made (of which I wasn’t already aware) that would make this onscreen sexual brutality worthwhile. But then I think, I’m staying with this purely because it’s by a woman director – a Danish woman director – and therefore it must somehow be inherently ok – it’s ART for God’s sake! – but if this exact same story with these exact same shots came from the camera of, say, Michael Bay, I doubt very much that Home would be screening it.

I’m off – as are another two audience members (including 50% of the female contingent).

On my woozy way home I turn my iPad back on (it has other uses than purely as a cinematic jizz shield). Checking out a few interviews with director Eklöf she is keen to defend the scene by saying that it’s not pornography because there are no close-ups. Seriously? Never come across the idea of voyeurism as a form of pornographic titillation, Isabella? There’s more than one kind of porn. I think to avoid the porn tag you really REALLY have to be doing something far more clearly not focussed on the visual representation of the explicit sexual act. I wonder also if she is assuming that what she is showing is so horrible that by definition it can’t be considered pornography. If only. Pornography is in the eye of the beholder. So to speak.

The other thing I learn is that it was a prosthetic penis after all.

I would say that I found that hard to get my head around – but I won’t as it sounds like a truly terrible and somewhat confused double entendre.

Ok, so it’s a fake cock. Does that make it better? It looked so real to me I assumed it was as real as the penises in Baise-Moi or Stranger By The Lake (which were the genuine article, complete with steaming ball-fresh semen). So if I am fooled by the member’s seeming verité then surely I HAVE to worry about use of a degrading sexual act not just as a narrative device but as something done to an actress on a movie set for a piece of paid entertainment. On the other hand, if I know in advance that it’s a rubber prosthetic, then it’s fundamentally trivial. It’s only pretend and it’s all about the artifice, and I’m no longer really concerned about the character. I’m just wondering how they got the jizz to fly out so convincingly, and ‘wow that still must have hurt when he stuck it down her throat’. Imagine having to fill out the risk assessment on that!

It now does precisely what devalued screen violence does. Whilst you might be alarmed by watching someone getting punched or slashed in a movie, you know it’s all fake so it’s rarely affecting. Unless of course you are either a) gullible or b) excited by the simulation of violence for the sake of entertainment. Indeed, I have (purposefully) adopted a fairly flip tone in this blog as to some of the things depicted in Holiday – serious issues of course – but I can, because now I know it didn’t really happen. It was just rubber and maybe a bit of CGI. The artifice invites me to stand my seriousness down.

Like I say, I am offering no judgement as to Holiday as a movie – I didn’t see how it resolved which I sincerely hope was in a worthy/intriguing/challenging way – all I can comment on is the stuff I saw, but I know I wasn’t alone in being driven from the cinema… and if that happens then surely the movie has failed.
Who is it for?
Does Eklöf want me to stay or to leave?
And if I do either of those, what does it say about me?
Assuming I do hang around, what is it trying to say and to whom?
Most fundamentally of all, does that thing need saying, does it need saying in that way, and if so, why?

There are also wider questions about art and cinema here. Do we need the dangerous moments in cinema to be obviously fake – or does this reveal something problematic with the self importance of film drama – a fundamental flaw/confusion in its aspirations to realism? If something looks real should we assume it isn’t – is that a healthy assumption or just an abdication of responsibility? If we do know it’s fake – or discover the fakery after the event – does that make it any less problematic?

For God’s sake, when is a penis not a penis?!?!

I stagger home, and crash out, hoping to sleep off the worst of my vaccination, comforted by the thought that in a few weeks I’ll be in Madagascar and I won’t have to worry about such questions…

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Sweet little Lemurs who know nothing of explicit Danish art cinema…

The Revelation of the Marmoset

13 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Brexit, Journalism, Political Satire, Politics, Satire

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‘Ande soe yt was thatte thye people of Albion looked acrosse the water to theire cousins yn the New Worlde who were rul-ed by a dylusyonal rhyhte wynged narssyssyste ande theye sayeth: ‘We want one of those’… ande theire wyshe was granted ande yt was trulye thye ende of dayes.’

Amen.

The Uxbridge Guide To Euro Jargon

06 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Brexit, Political Satire, Politics

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Someone recently asked me the meaning of ‘prorogue’, and so, herewith, my helpful guide to Euro jargon courtesy of the Uxbridge Publishing House.

Prorogue – Someone who engages in villainy for money – not just on an amateur basis. Particularly in reference to Conservative leadership hopefuls.

Quorate – An apple that’s been completely consumed.

Federal – Had your Aunty round for tea

Europhile – You resemble one of Adam Flemming’s ring binders (one for fans of BBC Brexitcast).

Plebiscite – When your neighbours stick a sofa on their front lawn and start drinking cans of Tennent’s. 

Declaration – When, after ten cans, one of them announces they are Declan Donelly’s cousin.

Border – How you feel after watching the Ten O’Clock News, Question Time, Newsnight and This Week in close succession, and they all discuss leaving the EU.

Irish Border – The RTE equivalent.

Withdrawal – How you speak after you’ve been to the dentist.

Brexit – What holding a referendum does to a country.